Paul G. Kengor – The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City Collegehttp://www.visionandvalues.org
At The Center for Vision & Values, we view a love for truth and a love for liberty as inseparable allies. We are a conservative think tank promoting conservative thought on today's issues.Wed, 20 Sep 2017 15:42:01 +0000en-UShourly1Forgotten conservative: Remembering George Schuylerhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/09/forgotten-conservative-remembering-george-schuyler/
http://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/09/forgotten-conservative-remembering-george-schuyler/#respondFri, 08 Sep 2017 14:54:19 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14736Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at The American Spectator.

It was 40 years ago, August 31, 1977, that George Schuyler died. He has been largely forgotten, and that’s a shame. At one point, Schuyler was one … More>

]]>Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at The American Spectator.

It was 40 years ago, August 31, 1977, that George Schuyler died. He has been largely forgotten, and that’s a shame. At one point, Schuyler was one of the most recognized and read columnists in America, particularly from his platform at one of America’s great African-American newspapers—the Pittsburgh Courier. He was also one of the nation’s top conservative voices.

My colleague Mary Grabar, who is writing a book on Schuyler and has done some of the best research and public speaking on the man, tells me about contacting two leading modern African-American conservatives about Schuyler. I’ll leave them unnamed, but it pained me to hear that one of them hadn’t even heard of Schuyler. It pains me more to know how many conservatives generally (black or white) have never heard of the man.

Raised in Syracuse, New York, George S. Schuyler would spend a crucial formative period in his 20s in the ideological asylum of New York City, where he devoted some time and energies to the left’s gods that failed: socialism and communism.

Schuyler was never a communist, which he excoriated with his brilliant, colorful flare. He was especially aghast at vigorous communist recruitment of African-Americans.

“The Negro had difficulties enough being black without becoming Red,” wrote Schuyler in his autobiography, Black and Conservative. He warned fellow African-Americans that “an attempt was being made by Communists to make a dupe out of the Negro which could only end in race war and his extermination.”

That was precisely what happened to Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the leading black American communist in the 1920s, who a decade later—after following his heart to Stalin’s USSR—perished in the Gulag. In the end, Lovett Fort-Whiteman was a black man treated the same way as a white man under Soviet communism: he was killed.

“With Communism bringing only misery to white people,” asked Schuyler, “what could it offer non-whites?” He saw right through communists and how they were seeking “viable tactics for corralling Negroes.”

Schuyler as early as June 1923, even before writing columns exposing communism, was publicly debating the likes of Soviet Comintern lackey Otto Huiswood, who Schuyler dubbed “a Red Uncle Tom always ready to do the Kremlin master’s bidding.” He blasted other black communists, from W.E.B. DuBois to Paul Robeson to Langston Hughes, and even called out (eventual) Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis. He lit up white socialists like Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, the English Fabians, and John Dewey, founding father of American public education.

“I never had any of the prevalent enthusiasm for the murderous Soviet regime,” explained Schuyler, referring specifically to American leftists/progressives of the day who thrilled over the “Soviet experiment.” He saw the Bolshevik regime “as a combined Asiatic Tammany and Mafia, much less democratic than Czarism had been. Many I encountered saw the Communists as the heralds of freedom, but to me they were a murderous gang, and I hoped they would be suppressed.”

This is good to remember today, as our universities and public schools teach our youth the extraordinary claim that—yeah, sure—the communists may have killed 100 million people or so, but they were good fighters for civil rights. That’s utter rubbish—a red herring. One wishes that George Schuyler were still around to eviscerate such nonsense.

Schuyler had no use for Bolshevism, but he did early in his formative years (1921) briefly join the Socialist Party. He learned the error of that way. He would soon come to reject “Socialist bilge” as much he spurned “Bolshevist twaddle.” And he didn’t hold back in blasting pro-Soviet leftists.

In response, Soviet sympathizers and “parlor pinks” (as Schuyler called them) teamed up in writing a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier demanding that Schuyler be immediately fired. Schuyler publicly responded to them (“appropriately,” he noted) on April Fools’ Day 1938. There, he marveled at “the stampede to Communism by so-called intellectuals,” which he said was “no more intelligent than a stampede of cattle.” These intellectuals had been “hypnotized by the sonorous and hollow hokum of revolutionary psychopaths” in Moscow who promised to “usher in a world of love by increasing the volume of hatred.” These “goose-stepping ‘intellectuals’ began to yammer the praises of Stalin,” and saw “everything in America as bad and everything in Russia as good.” Said Schuyler, “they are the most disillusioned people in the country.”

Schuyler was particularly scathing in denouncing the Comintern-Communist Party USA efforts to create a separate, segregated African-American state in the South. Yes, that’s right. In 1930, at a Comintern conference in Moscow, a resolution was passed calling for a Soviet-directed and controlled “Negro Republic” among America’s Southern states. The Soviet Comintern, working through American communists, actually crafted plans for a “separate Negro state.” The strategy was to foment an African-American rebellion within the South, which would join forces with a workers’ uprising in the North. As Mary Grabar notes, Schuyler wrote brilliantly against what he dubbed “The Separate State Hokum.”

Schuyler instead preferred African-American voices like the great Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington rather than gushing admirers of Stalin like Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, the latter of whom had urged his fellow Americans to “put one more ‘S’ in the USA to make it Soviet. The USA when we take control will be the USSA.”

While blasting collectivism, Schuyler extolled the virtues of conservatism, which he spoke of in very American terms, and which he applied to race. He wrote in Black and Conservative:

The American Negro is a prime example of the survival of the fittest…. He has been the outstanding example of American conservatism: adjustable, resourceful, adaptable, patient, restrained…. This has been the despair of the reformers who have tried to lead him up on the mountain and who have promised him eternal salvation. Through the succeeding uproars and upheavals that have attended our national development, the Negro has adjusted himself to every change with the basic aim of survival and advancement…. The ability to conserve, consolidate, and change when expedient is the hallmark of individual and group intelligence.

He said that black Americans “have less reason than any others to harbor any feelings of inferiority.”

Schuyler wrote those words in 1966. Think of all the black Americans who since that time have persevered and truly achieved the American dream. If ever there was a group that survived and thrived with government directly stacked against them—from legalized slavery to Dred Scott—it has been African-Americans. They embody the conservative philosophy of looking to oneself and one’s God rather than to one’s government.

Schuyler affirmed: “I learned very early in life that I was colored but from the beginning this fact of life did not distress, restrain, or overburden me. One takes things as they are, lives with them, and tries to turn them to one’s advantage or seeks another locale where the opportunities are more favorable. This was the conservative viewpoint of my parents and my family. It has been mine through life.”

Schuyler was, in that sense, American above all else.

“The more I read about him, the more I see that Americanism was the consistent element in Schuyler’s thought,” says Mary Grabar. “He did flirt with socialism and even some communist ideas, but he never once entertained the thought that he was less than 100 percent American.”

And throughout that American life, George Schuyler’s columns were read by millions of Americans. He was a leading voice of conservatism, and arguably the top (at least in his time) black conservative. We should pause to remember the man, his mighty pen, and his contributions.

]]>http://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/09/forgotten-conservative-remembering-george-schuyler/feed/0VIDEO — Reagan Forum Lecture — featuring Dr. Paul Kengorhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/08/video-reagan-forum-lecture-featuring-dr-paul-kengor/
Thu, 24 Aug 2017 13:49:57 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14687On August 8, 2017, Dr. Paul Kengor, executive director of The Center for Vision & Values and political science professor at Grove City College, gave a Reagan Forum lecture at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, CA. Kengor discusses his … More>]]>On August 8, 2017, Dr. Paul Kengor, executive director of The Center for Vision & Values and political science professor at Grove City College, gave a Reagan Forum lecture at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, CA. Kengor discusses his new book, A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century.

From the Reagan Foundation: “Based on Kengor’s tireless archival digging and his unique access to Reagan insiders, A Pope and a President reveals: The many similarities and the spiritual bond between the pope and the president—and how Reagan privately spoke of the “DP”: the Divine Plan to take down communism, a startling insider account of how the USSR may have been set to invade the pope’s native Poland in March 1981—only to pull back when news broke that Reagan had been shot, and more. As kindred spirits, Ronald Reagan and John Paul II united in pursuit of a supreme objective—and in doing so they changed history.”

Cardinal Karol Wojtyła arrived in the United States for a six-week visit in the summer of 1976. The Polish cardinal came to America that bicentennial summer for a festive celebration of intimacy … More>

]]>Editor’s note: This article first appeared at Stream.org.

Cardinal Karol Wojtyła arrived in the United States for a six-week visit in the summer of 1976. The Polish cardinal came to America that bicentennial summer for a festive celebration of intimacy with Jesus: the Church’s Forty-First International Eucharistic Congress. It was held in Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress had declared independence two hundred years earlier. He traveled throughout the United States, visiting cities big and small. He began his trek in Boston, home of revolutionary patriots.

The Eucharistic Congress ran August 1–8. The huge event included a little-known nun named Mother Teresa, whom Wojtyła had met only recently. Wojtyła and Mother Teresa were overshadowed by the presence of names better known at the time: Dorothy Day, Cardinal John Krol and even President Gerald Ford, who attended Mass in the city’s Municipal (JFK) Stadium on August 3.

Wojtyła’s Message of Freedom

Wojtyła spoke at that Mass, which was dedicated to “The Eucharist and Man’s Hunger for Freedom.” The cardinal’s speech might as well have had the same title. He gave a powerful statement expressing not just the goodness of the Body of Christ but also his sense of the forces of evil threatening the world — the forces aligned against freedom, the freedom that man wanted and that God wanted for man. The cardinal from communist-occupied Poland was very much aware that he was speaking in a country that just a month earlier had celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of its own triumph of freedom.

Wojtyła started by quoting from Luke’s Gospel:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me; he has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free.

These, said the cardinal, were the words of a thirty-year-old Christ as He arose in the synagogue of Nazareth facing His fellow countrymen officially for the first time. By those words, He revealed His messianic mission. That same Christ, said Wojtyła, “today faces us all, the People of the New Covenant, here on American soil, in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.”

The future pontiff then addressed the “hunger of the human soul, which is no less than the hunger for real freedom.” Each of us to some extent knows what this freedom is, said Wojtyła. “It is the principal trait of humanity and the source of human dignity.” He quoted from the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. That documentaffirmed that “authentic freedom” is “an exceptional sign of the divine image within man” and that “man’s dignity demands that he act according to a conscious and free choice.” Wojtyła continued, sharing words that the Protestants who signed the Declaration of Independence in that city two hundred years earlier would have appreciated:

Freedom is at the same time offered to man and imposed upon him as a task. It is in the first place an attribute of the human person and in this sense it is a gift of the Creator and an endowment of human nature. For this reason it is also the lawful right of man; man has a right to freedom, to self-determination, to the choice of his life career, to acting according to his own convictions. Freedom has been given to man by his Creator in order to be used, and to be used well.

Thus, God is the antithesis of the earthly destroyers of freedom — men like the totalitarians in Moscow and other communist capitals. As Fulton Sheen wrote in Peace of Soul, “God refuses to be a totalitarian dictator in order to abolish evil by destroying human freedom.”

A Hunger for Freedom

Of course, Cardinal Wojtyła said, we know perfectly well that man abuses liberty. Man can do wrong because he is free.

That is the risk.

That is also the beauty of freedom. As Wojtyła noted, the Creator has given man freedom not so that he will commit evil but so he will do good: “Freedom has been given to man in order to love, to love true good.”

This was an view of freedom that Pope John Paul II would underscore again and again. The concept would be central to some of John Paul’s greatest encyclicals, including Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth) and Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason).

Expressing an idea that Ronald Reagan often communicated, Wojtyła said that there is a universal aspiration for freedom:

The hunger for freedom passes through the heart of every man. … The hunger for freedom passes also through the history of the human race, through the history of nations and peoples. It reveals their spiritual maturity and at the same time tests it.

Americans had gained that freedom, said Wojtyła, whereas Poles had lost theirs. It was time for freedom to reassert itself. Now Poland needed help for its own independence — from the clutches of godless communism.

Would an American leader step forward to assist in that cause?

God and Reagan in Kansas City

As Karol Wojtyła toured America, his future partner in the crusade against communism was crisscrossing the country as well. Ronald Reagan was campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. In that endeavor, Reagan boldly challenged the sitting Republican president. It was an audacious move, but Reagan felt he had no choice. Gerald Ford’s presidency had been disappointing in many ways, not least in his embrace of détente.

The previous summer, President Ford had mistreated Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn during the great Soviet dissident’s much-anticipated visit to America. Ford snubbed Solzhenitsyn because he did not want to anger Soviet authorities.

Solzhenitsyn had been in Washington to speak to the AFL-CIO, just down the street from the White House. It was a perfect time for Ford to meet with him. Conservatives, from Republicans like Reagan, Jack Kemp and Jesse Helms to anticommunist Democrats like Scoop Jackson, urged the president. Ford refused. He was backed by his right-hand man in foreign policy, Henry Kissinger. The Ford administration dared not offend Leonid Brezhnev’s regime by shaking hands with the Kremlin’s enemy. Worse, as historian Douglas Brinkley recorded, Ford privately called Solzhenitsyn “a godd*mn horse’s a**.”

Even the liberal New York Times editorial board and Jimmy Carter slammed President Ford for refusing to meet with Solzhenitsyn. William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review actually considered endorsing Carter in 1976 in response.

For Reagan, Ford’s humiliation of Solzhenitsyn was one of the last straws. He was so rankled that he decided to challenge Ford. Like Karol Wojtyła, Reagan wanted America to take the lead in the fight for freedom. If only Americans would seize that role with the right leadership, they could win the Cold War, and the Soviets could lose.

Reagan wanted to provide that leadership. And so he went to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City with an unlikely upset victory in mind. How close did he come to pulling it off?

Extremely.

The Letter to the Future

At the last minute, a number of key states at the convention moved into Reagan’s column and nearly allowed the former governor to overtake Ford. In the dramatic showdown at Kansas City’s Kemper Arena on August 19, Reagan missed the nomination by a little over a hundred votes. He grabbed 47.4 percent of delegates in an 1,187–1,070 contest.

Ford let out a huge sigh of relief.

Once the final ballots were in, a gracious Ford waved to Reagan and Nancy in their box in the arena. With all the TV cameras fixed on the Reagans, before a national audience of tens of millions, Ford invited them to the main stage, as the GOP faithful shouted: “Ron! Ron! Ron! … Speech! Speech! Speech!” “Ron, will you come down and bring Nancy?” pleaded Ford. A reluctant Reagan relented, telling Nancy as they were whisked through backstage corridors, “I haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m going to say.”

Well, Reagan figured out what to say. He proceeded to give, extemporaneously, one of the finest, most memorable speeches of his life.

“If I could just take a moment,” Reagan began. Then dove in with gusto:

I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our tercentennial. It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and issues of the day and I set out to do so, riding down the coast in an automobile looking at the blue Pacific out on one side and the Santa Ynez mountains on the other, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was going to be that beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day. And then, as I tried to write. …

Here Reagan paused, asking his audience to turn their minds to the same task: what would each of them write “for people a hundred years from now who know all about us? We know nothing about them. We don’t know what kind of a world they’ll be living in.”

Reagan then gave his response to the assignment, which related to nuclear war and a civilized world:

We live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, that can, in a matter of minutes, arrive in each other’s country and destroy virtually the civilized world we live in. And suddenly it dawned on me. Those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here.”

Reagan pondered:

Will they look back with appreciation and say, “Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept our world from nuclear destruction” ? … This is our challenge.

“There’s a Reason for This”

Everyone in the room was locked in, completely silent. “The power of the speech was extraordinary,” said Edmund Morris. “And you could just feel throughout the auditorium the palpable sense among the delegates that [they had] nominated the wrong guy.”

They had indeed. Gerald Ford, their nominee, went on to lose the presidency to Jimmy Carter.

The conventional wisdom was that four years later, in 1980, Reagan would be too old for the presidency. Going down in ’76, he was down for good.

The loss was traumatic for everyone, except Ronald Reagan. His daughter, Maureen, cried for days. She later recalled that each time her father saw her he would ask, “Are you still crying?” Finally, Reagan pulled his daughter aside and shared his calming “God-has-a-plan” theology. “There’s a reason for this,” he told Maureen. “Everything happens for a reason. … If you just keep doing what you’re doing, the path is going to open up.”

For Ronald Reagan, as for Karol Wojtyła, there was a reason: a shared sense that God had a plan for him in the world and the course of history.

It was a course that within just a few short years was about to change dramatically. The world would face a new president in the White House and a new pope at the Vatican.

]]>Trump’s Excellent Speech in Poland, on Poland, and about Polandhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/07/14538/
Wed, 12 Jul 2017 13:38:17 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14538Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at The American Spectator.

Before I write this defense of Donald Trump in Poland, let me remind readers—from the right and the left—that I come to this subject with some credibility. … More>

]]>Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at The American Spectator.

Before I write this defense of Donald Trump in Poland, let me remind readers—from the right and the left—that I come to this subject with some credibility. Not only have I written many articles and even books on the likes of John Paul II and Poland but I’ve been highly critical of Donald Trump, especially his past statements on NATO and Russia. My biggest concern about Trump in foreign policy was precisely this area. His gullibility toward Vladimir Putin and the Russians on the campaign trail in 2016 appalled me. I was very fearful (and still am) of a President Trump being manipulated by the Kremlin in a damaging way we haven’t seen from a Republican president. We conservatives have come to expect Democratic presidents to be dupes to the Kremlin, from Franklin Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama. But we expect better from a Republican president.

In fact, it was exactly this time last year, in July 2016, that Trump revealed Roosevelt-like pretenses when he glowed in one of his silliest Tweets: “Putin likes me.” That was same the language that FDR had used about Stalin as Stalin exploited him. (“He likes me,” Roosevelt boasted to Churchill on March 18, 1942, grinning in self-satisfaction over warm feelings he felt from his pal “Uncle Joe.”)

Trump’s naïveté was not limited to Twitter outbursts. Shortly after that July 25, 2016 Tweet, he appeared on ABC’s “This Week,” where he again engaged in humiliating self-flattery regarding Putin: “He has said nice things about me over the years,” Trump cooed. “I remember years ago, he said something, many years ago, he said something very nice about me.”

Once Trump was elected, my glimmer of hope was that such awful statements would give way to shrewd advisers that would set him along a firmer policy path and more sensible statements toward our friends in Poland and the Baltic region—the very survivors of the Soviet communist onslaught whose liberation we sought.

Well, that brings me to Trump’s speech in Warsaw last week.

The Donald Trump in Warsaw in July 2017 was so much better than the Trump of July 2016. In fact, I must go further: Trump’s speech in Poland was outstanding.

It is important to understand that I came to that conclusion after reading every line of the speech unfiltered, without listening to a single reaction. I was tasked to analyze the speech by a Polish publication with an immediate turnaround deadline. I didn’t consult anyone. I didn’t gaze at the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC and Fox. Thus, when I later glimpsed the hysterical, warped, vicious rants by people on the left—losing their minds over alleged Trump grunts about “Western civilization”—I shook my head in disgust. Especially appalling was the charge that Trump was blowing “white-nationalist dog whistles” in Warsaw.

It literally pains me to waste time and ink responding to these tirades, which outdo some of the worst examples of Trump’s own hyperbole. They are totally out-of-line and utterly undeserving of a response.

The truth is that this was an excellent speech that Trump made in Poland—and that’s because the speech was on Poland. It was about Poland.

Here’s a stunner for you: Click a link to the transcript and see if you can find the phrase “Western civilization.” It isn’t there. (Yes, it has several references to the “West.”) By contrast, words like “Poland,” “Polish,” and “Poles” appear nearly 70 times. John Paul II was mentioned three times, and thus three times more than Western civilization was mentioned. Copernicus and Chopin and Pulaski and Kosciuszko and George Washington and Ronald Reagan and the Katyn Woods and the Miracle at Vistula were each mentioned more than Western civilization. The Warsaw Ghetto and Warsaw Uprising and the saving of Jews were mentioned 12 times by this loathsome white-nationalist dog-whistler—who paused to hail the special guests in the audience who rescued Poland’s Jews.

Enough of the left-wing hokum and handwringing. What we’re hearing there is less about Trump and Western civ than the left and Western civ. Liberals despise Western civ. They’ve annihilated it in their universities. They refuse to teach it. It is firmly fixed in their crosshairs.

You want a dog whistle? Here it is: Commend Western civ, and then watch liberals go barking mad. It’s precisely that university-trained ideological perversity that prompts mis-educated college students in Indiana to mistake a Dominican friar for a klansman. (Think I’m exaggerating? Click here.) It’s what prompts an Ivy League graduate to look at the American Founding and think not of the laws of nature and nature’s God but of trans-phobia.

Enough. Let’s not dignify these political-ideological obsessions. Let’s not take the bait. Now, on to the speech….

The text of Trump’s remarks is roughly 3,600 words, interrupted several times by sustained chants of “Donald Trump! Donald Trump! Donald Trump!” That’s no surprise for anyone who knows anything about Poland, as President Trump’s speechwriter clearly did. If you understand the 20th century crucible that was Poland—the “martyred nation of Poland,” as Ronald Reagan called it—the earthly hell that the Polish people went through, then you’ll appreciate why Poles were so moved by this speech.

It started with the opening, where President Trump called it a “profound honor” to be in Warsaw and in “a Poland that is safe, strong and free.” He told Poles that America “is eager to expand our partnership with you.” It was, he noted, his first visit to Central Europe as president, and specifically to “this magnificent, beautiful piece of land.” He called Poland “the geographic heart of Europe” and the Polish people “the soul of Europe.”

He connected to Poland’s suffering: “Your nation is great because your spirit is great and your spirit is strong. For two centuries, Poland suffered constant and brutal attacks. But while Poland could be invaded and occupied and its borders even erased from the map, it could never be erased from history or from your hearts. In those dark days, you have lost your land, but you never lost your pride.” He affirmed: “Despite every effort to transform you, oppress you or destroy you, you endured and overcame.”

Trump saluted various Polish “great heroes” and patriots who joined American soldiers from the American Revolution all the way through Afghanistan and Iraq. Said Trump: “The story of Poland is the story of a people who have never lost hope, who have never been broken and who have never, ever forgotten who they are.”

This is a nation more than 1,000 years old. Your borders were erased for more than a century and only restored just one century ago.

In 1920, in the Miracle of Vistula, Poland stopped the Soviet Army bent on European conquest.

Then 19 years later, in 1938 [sic], you were invaded yet again; this time by Nazi Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east. That’s trouble.

That’s tough.

Under a double occupation, the Polish people endured evils beyond description: the Katyn Forest Massacre, the occupation, the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the destruction of this beautiful capital city, and the deaths of nearly one in five Polish people.

A vibrant Jewish population, the largest in Europe, was reduced to almost nothing after the Nazis systematically murdered millions of Poland’s Jewish citizens, along with countless others during that brutal occupation.

In the summer of 1944, the Nazi and Soviet armies were preparing for a terrible and bloody battle right here in Warsaw. Amid that Hell on Earth, the citizens of Poland rose up to defend their homeland.

I am deeply honored to be joined on stage today by veterans and heroes of the Warsaw uprising.

What great spirit.

We salute your noble sacrifice and we pledge to always remember your fight for Poland and for freedom. Thank you. Thank you. […]

From the other side of the river, the Soviet armed forces stopped and waited.

They watched as the Nazis ruthlessly destroyed the city, viciously murdering men, women and children. […]

The Polish martyr Bishop Michal Kozal said it well: “More horrifying of a defeat of arms is a collapse of the human spirit.” Through four decades of Communist rule, Poland and the other captive nations of Europe endured a brutal campaign to demolish freedom, your faith, your laws, your history, your identity; indeed, the very essence of your culture and your humanity.

Yet through it all, you never lost that spirit.

Your oppressors tried to break you, but Poland could not be broken.

Anyone who dares to discern racist “white-nationalism” among these wonderful words of praise to a people who richly earned them needs serious help.

Trump next spoke of Poland’s most famous native son, Karol Wojtyla, who came to Warsaw as the first-ever Slavic pontiff and spoke at Victory Square on June 2, 1979, the start of nine days in Poland that changed history. Trump noted how Poles then had cried out, “We want God:”

The people of Poland, the people of America and the people of Europe still cry out, “We want God.” Together with Pope John Paul II, the Poles reasserted their identity as a nation devoted to God.

Here were good words from an American president—words unheard by Polish ears over the previous eight years under President Barack Obama. And here, mercifully, was a new president who openly called out the “threat” of “radical Islamic terrorism,” here characterized by President Trump as another “oppressive ideology” that, like the “specter of communism,” seeks to “export terrorism and extremism all around the globe.” The 45th president asked for Poland’s help in defeating that “menace.” He said that “a strong Poland is a blessing to the nations of Europe … a blessing to the West, and to the world.”

Trump wrapped up the speech with stirring words that evoked John Paul II’s renowned thoughts of preserving Polish identity, culture, and memory:

Our freedom, our civilization and our survival depend on these bonds of history, culture and memory. And today, as ever, Poland is in our heart, and its people are in that fight.

Just as Poland could not be broken, I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail, our people will thrive, and our civilization will triumph. […]

So together let us all fight like the Poles, for family, for freedom, for country and for God.

Even then, President Trump could have said more. For instance, he gave only a passing nod to the NATO joint security commitment, saying clearly but all-too-briefly: “we stand firmly behind Article V, the mutual defense commitment.” That was good to hear, but more needed to be said, especially from this particular speaker in light of his poor statements about NATO on the campaign trail.

Trump also should have said more about bringing Poland back into the joint U.S. missile-defense rubric that Obama dropped on September 17, 2009, the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s Red Army invasion of Poland—one of Obama’s shameless moments of accommodation of Vlad and the Russians. Trump said only, “we applaud Poland for its decision to move forward this week on acquiring from the United States the battle-tested Patriot air and missile defense system, the best anywhere in the world.”

Acquiring? As in, what, buying? The heck with that, man, build a joint missile shield with Poland! Stop the silly “financial obligation” baloney. This is a matter of serious national security, not silly populism for Fox News watchers.

More needs to be said on this from our president.

And likewise, Donald Trump didn’t exactly torch Vladimir Putin in this speech. There was only this small statement on Russia: “We urge Russia to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere and its support for hostile regimes, including Syria and Iran.”

That was it.

But alas, this speech was clearly intended to be less about drawing out policy than re-forging a bond between the United States and Poland, one that was ripped by the previous president his first year in office.

To be sure, Donald Trump was obviously so vastly better talking about Poland and NATO here than on the campaign trail in 2016 because he was scripted. He was reading words prepared for him by intelligent speechwriters and researchers.

In all, a great speech in Poland, on Poland, and about Poland.

]]>Marking Natural Law with Mark Levinhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/07/marking-natural-law-with-mark-levin/
Thu, 06 Jul 2017 13:11:05 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14522Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at American Spectator.

The latter half of the title will draw eyes right away. Glancing the table of contents, I almost jumped straight ahead to the chapters on the “Progressive Masterminds” and the “Philosopher-Kings,” where you’ll find the dismal likes of Herbert Croly, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, the awful John Dewey, Walter Weyl (the “Progressive Masterminds”), followed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the colossally destructive Karl Marx (“Philosopher-Kings”).

All of that is obviously intriguing, as are the chapters that follow on the tyranny of the administrative state vs. the blessings of liberty, property, and republicanism. But it’s actually the opening of the book—the very first chapter—that is indispensable and what I’d like to highlight here. It’s worth reading this summer and, in fact, any and every day of the year. Read it yourself and share it with others.

The opening of the book underscores the vital importance of natural law. That is, the vital importance of natural law to Americans and to all of humanity—and what has been forgotten in that respect. To rediscover Americanism is to rediscover natural law. Levin understands that.

And what is natural law? I’ll quote Levin first and then highlight just a portion of what he cites from others.

Levin writes that “natural law provides a moral compass or order—justice, virtue, truth, prudence, etc.—a fundamental, universal, everlasting harmony of mores that transcend human law. Through natural law discovered by right reason, man knows right from wrong and good from bad.”

Natural law is right law. And unfortunately, as Levin notes, “that which is naturally just may not be legally just.” Indeed, to the contrary, all sorts of governments make laws that are unjust, especially laws that ignore or violate the natural law, from the legal right to own a slave to the legal right to kill unborn children, from the denial of the inherent humanity and dignity of a black person (the Dred Scott case) to the denial of the inherent humanity and dignity of an unborn person (Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood). These laws of the state contravene the laws of nature. That, in essence, first and foremost, is why they are unjust laws.

To borrow the language of the Declaration of Independence, natural law stems from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The American Founders believed this. They adhered to it. You cannot understand the Founding, America, and Americanism without understanding this.

In this, the Founders invoked a tradition dating back to the Old and New Testaments, to Aristotle and Cicero, to Augustine and Aquinas. And in particular, they were inspired by the natural law writings of 17th century Englishman John Locke. Mark Levin puts it this way: “Locke said, as have others, that natural law is forever and enduring, and man-made law, which may vary from place to place and time to time, clearly is not. That which is just and virtuous is just and virtuous regardless of the passage of laws or time.”

This flies in direct contrast to the principles (if we can call them “principles”) of modern secular progressivism, where truths (if we can call them “truths”) are said to evolve over time, and that what is deemed just and virtuous (if we can call it “just” and “virtuous”) is in a constant state of never-ending flux and evolution—of “progress”—that forever unfolds and that always mysteriously lies ahead in the future rather than in anything immutable from the past. This is why the likes of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk—and the principles of conservatism—uphold the value of tradition, experience, and custom, so long as the traditions, experiences, and customs are grounded in the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God. Those are the permanent things, the first things, the fixed order knowable by reason and observable by the rules of nature and nature’s God.

Thus, as Levin notes, echoing the sentiments of Cicero, “natural law is superior to, and precedes, political and governmental institutions.” For instance, the Golden Rule—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—is a universally recognized ethic. It is referred to as the Golden Rule because it is universally true and just.

Hence, to stick with my earlier examples: to own and enslave or kill and maim another human being is always wrong because it’s always wrong—you know it, you sense it, you feel it—no matter what a majority of nine black-robed jurists might say or what Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer and Cecile Richards and the Democratic National Committee might say.

On the matter of slavery, no American was, of course, as important as Abraham Lincoln. And it’s vital to realize that Lincoln appealed to natural law. Levin quotes a beautiful statement from Lincoln made in Lewistown, Illinois in August 1858. Lincoln knew that the Founders knew that slavery was wrong, even if they could not muster the will or way to personally and politically extricate themselves from it in 1776. Nonetheless, as Lincoln knew, they established the moral basis for why it was wrong in their very words. As Lincoln said of the Founders:

In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows…. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take course to renew the battle which their fathers began—so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was built.

Lincoln told his fellow countrymen that they may do with him whatever they chose, even “put me to death,” but they must nonetheless “heed these sacred principles.”

And that they remain: sacred. What is sacred should not be denied. Men can make laws of their own doing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those laws are just, or sacred.

That’s only a snippet of what Mark Levin offers in this book. He states from the outset that he’s well aware that this book will not be changing the course of history, “but if it can open a few eyes it will have served its purpose.”

Well, given Mark Levin’s platform and influence, and ability to sell books, it should open more than a few eyes—especially those who have been blinded to these truths by our ghastly government schools and monolithically left-wing universities. That means that Levin, via this book, will be educating a substantial number of Americans on vital concepts like natural law. In that, he’s truly doing the Lord’s work.

]]>Remembering the Rohna: A World War II Secret and Tragedyhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/05/remembering-the-rohna-a-world-war-ii-secret-and-tragedy/
Wed, 24 May 2017 15:54:23 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14391Any veteran of World War II can tell you stories. But for Frank E. Bryer, his story—one he could never forget—was a terrible one. It began the moment his ship, called the Rohna, was sunk. When that ship went down … More>]]>Any veteran of World War II can tell you stories. But for Frank E. Bryer, his story—one he could never forget—was a terrible one. It began the moment his ship, called the Rohna, was sunk. When that ship went down on November 26, 1943, Frank’s life changed forever. And very few people beyond the men tossed into the sea ever knew what happened.

The HMT Rohna was an 8,600-ton British troopship carrying mostly an American crew to the Far East theatre. It went down the day after Thanksgiving, in the Mediterranean, off the coast of North Africa, the victim of a German missile. But it was not just any German missile. This was, it seems, the first known successful “hit” of a vessel by a German rocket-boosted, radio/remote-controlled “glider” bomb—i.e., one of the first true missiles used in combat. It was, in effect, a guided missile, and the Nazis had achieved it first.

And the results were immediately destructive: According to the website that today serves as the official online gathering spot for the Rohna Survivors Association, more lives were lost on the Rohna than on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor.

Over one thousand boys lost their lives, and their government kept the entire episode a secret out of fear of information being leaked about the power of the German guided missile. The government feared the effect on the morale of the U.S. military and the wider population.

“The ‘hit’ was so devastating,” states the Rohna Survivors Association, “that the U.S. Government placed a veil of secrecy upon it. The events which followed were so shameful that the secrecy continued for decades until recently, when documents were grudgingly released under pressure of the Freedom of Information Act. The government still does not acknowledge this tragedy, thus most families of the casualties still do not know the fate of their loved ones.”

The German attack was such a terrible success, and the American tragedy so severe, that what happened with the Rohna was completely hushed up during the war and still has not made its way into history books. Only in the last decade or two is it starting to get attention. A Wikipedia page exists, which is better than what existed only a few years ago—which was nothing. History.com has a short entry on the calamity. A search at Amazon yields a few self-published memoirs or small-publisher historical works.

It is very sad that only now, long after the few survivors are even fewer, the Rohna survivors are attempting to hold reunions, over 70 years after the event.

The secrecy was so tight that Frank Bryer’s daughter, Mary Jo Palmer, spent painstaking years with her dad trying to tug out details and piece together what occurred. “Dad was haunted frequently by this,” Mary Jo told me, “but it was not so much the sinking of the ship, but his inability to save many men.”

Those awful moments of fire remained seared in Frank’s brain. As the ship burst into a giant fireball, Frank manned the ropes of a lifeboat packed with injured soldiers. He was ordered to hold the ropes tight and lower the boat with the soldiers into the water below. This was no simple task, especially in a chaotic, panicked situation. A lifeboat filled with men isn’t light. That was proven quickly as the ropes broke and Frank watched the men below him in his care fall to their death in the sea. The image of those men slipping from his hands into the abyss horrified him.

But the nightmares would come later. In the meantime, Frank, too, was forced to abandon ship, which submerged within merely an hour. For his own crowded lifeboat, he and five other men seized a floating wooden bench. As the darkness slowly enveloped them, with night setting in, and with the fear of still more German missiles, Frank led the group in reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Frank would later write of this dark evening:

Destroyers were ordered to put thick smoke screens up to help camouflage the area. Other German planes flew over with orders to shoot to kill men floating in the water. I can remember as we floated in the ocean watching other soldiers hanging onto the ship for dear life. We watched as the ship went down to the very end. The back of the ship went down first and the bow (front) was pointed straight up sky. It then just went down slowly until we could no longer see it. It is something that I will never forget.

There were other ships in the convoy that passed by, not seeing or hearing Frank and his crewmates. “It was the worst feeling you could possibly have,” said Frank. “I was sure that it was the end. I told the group of men that we better start to pray…. We were scared, shaking, and moaning.”

Those that had survived the explosion were scattered everywhere, yelling and crying for help. “My mind was on the life boat that fell into the ocean,” said Frank. “All I could do was ask God to take them fast so that they would not have to suffer.” He and his group with their floating wooden bench took turns—four of them would float on the bench and two would hang on the ropes.

They feared not only Germans but sharks, and for good reason. Anyone familiar with the horror story that was the USS Indianapolis knows how the sharks slowly but steadily devoured the boys floating in the water over a course of several long days.

This time alone in the water at night was a “hard time,” said Frank. They ached for their families. They talked about home. Frank told his crewmates about his time in his youth living and working at the Villa Maria convent in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he spent much of his time because of a difficult family life. He later laughed at how the guys “didn’t understand how I could be living with nuns.”

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. And there were none on that wooden bench in the water that night either. “Two of the men didn’t think that they would go to Heaven, but I told them they would if they asked God for His mercy and forgiveness,” said Frank. “We would wrap around each other and I would say the Our Father and Act of Contrition. We just talked to God. It was a long night.”

The crew of six tried to get some sleep while floating in the cold water, but couldn’t. They needed to stay focused on holding on to their floating device—the bench. To their great fortune, they were in the water only for about six hours. Just as the sun started to rise, they spied a rescue boat on the horizon. It was a Minesweep that picked them up.

“I thanked God for saving us,” said Frank. “I asked the men if they thought that our prayers had been answered.”

They were taken to a facility in Algeria to recover. But for Frank, there was little emotional comfort. All he could think about was the wounded soldiers that he could not save: “I thought of the pain they must have endured. A sergeant told me that there was nothing that I could have done. I couldn’t sleep and had bad dreams, sometimes jumping out of bed and yelling for help.”

But worst of all, Frank could not share what he was going through. They were ordered not to write or talk about the Rohna with their family or even among themselves. The military censorship was so strict that they were threatened with court martial if they disobeyed.

And like so many World War II soldiers, Frank’s ordeal did not earn him a ticket home after having experienced enough trauma for a lifetime. He was ordered to heal up and return to the service, which he did through the duration of the war, and then some. He was officially discharged on March 21, 1946 after an endless bout of island-hopping throughout the Pacific theater.

That, too, was no day at the beach.

“I thank God that I am still alive because I should have been dead a hundred times,” he said in his 90s.

Frank Bryer died on January 4, 2016 at age 92, seven decades after the sinking of the Rohna. He now at long last rests in peace. And perhaps only now has he been reconciled with those wounded boys who lives plunged to their death below him on November 26, 1943.

]]>Two Presidents and Two Popeshttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/05/two-presidents-and-two-popes/
Tue, 23 May 2017 14:11:57 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14386Editor’s note: This article first appeared at Stream.org.

Thirty-five years ago, on June 7, 1982, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II met for the first time at the Vatican. The two were of one mind and one mission.

Thirty-five years ago, on June 7, 1982, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II met for the first time at the Vatican. The two were of one mind and one mission.

It had been a little over year since both had been shot and nearly bled to death. Now, they talked alone in the Vatican Library. The attempted assassinations were raised right away. Reagan told the pontiff: “Look how the evil forces were put in our way and how Providence intervened.”

Bill Clark, Reagan’s closest aide, said that both men referred to the “miraculous” fact they had survived. And now, “because of their mutual interests,” said Clark, they came together to “form some sort of collaboration.”

What kind of collaboration? One that would truly change history.

The Protestant and Catholic, said Clark, shared a “unity” in spiritual views and in their “vision on the Soviet empire.” That day in Rome, said Clark, they discussed their joint sense that they had been given “a spiritual mission—a special role in the divine plan of life,” and agreed that “atheistic communism lived a lie that, when fully understood, must ultimately fail.”

The two leaders, temporal and spiritual, also had mutual ideas on what should be done to end the Cold War. Reagan told the pope that “hope remains,” most notably in the battleground that was Poland. “We, working together,” he told the Polish pontiff, “can keep it alive.”

They sure did. Pio Laghi, the pope’s representative to the United States, would say of this Reagan-John Paul II meeting: “Nobody believed the collapse of communism would happen this fast or on this timetable. But in their first meeting, Holy Father and president committed themselves and the institutions of the Church and America to such a goal. And from that day, the focus was to bring it about.”

And aside from the singular purpose, the two men held much more in common. Both bravely fought what John Paul II dubbed the “Culture of Death,” affirming what Reagan called “the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning,” and what John Paul II called “the first of the fundamental rights, the right to life.” Reagan said that “every per­son is a sacred reality;” John Paul II said that every person is “a unique and unrepeatable gift of God.” They both insisted upon the interdependence of faith and freedom, the principle of subsidiarity, and the need to speak out unequivocally against evil.

All of which brings me to Donald Trump and Pope Francis.

Such meaningful presidential-papal commonalities—which, for Reagan and John Paul II, enabled them to change the world—is lacking in the case of Donald Trump and Pope Francis. The presidential-papal meeting at the Vatican on May 24, 2017 will be utterly unlike the presidential-papal meeting at the Vatican on June 7, 1982.

Think about it. Regardless of their respective strengths and weaknesses, it’s hard to find a lot of shared outlook between the man in the White House today and the man in the Vatican today. Do they possess a mutual understanding of what currently serves as the great global menace, or how to defeat it? What would President Trump and Pope Francis list as the dominant threats today? Radical Islam? Trump might, but not in the way—or certainly not with the preferred response—that Francis would.

Now, that said, this meeting could surprise people, and disappoint those looking for fireworks. Sure, the optics will be intriguing. But as for pundits hoping for a fight, I think they’ll be disappointed.

After all, personality-wise, maybe the two men aren’t terribly dissimilar. Both have strong personalities; they are colorful, outspoken, and infamous for off-the-cuff comments. Neither is afraid to speak his mind, or stick his foot in his mouth. Pope Francis on an airplane with an open mic can be as freewheeling as Donald Trump with his Twitter account unmonitored by Kellyanne Conway, leaving lots of clean-up for spokespeople. The two men both operate with a folksy candor sometimes endearing and sometimes maddening. They might get along better than people assume.

I don’t expect a verbal sparring match over “building walls.” Francis is too winsome to provoke a contentious disagreement. He’s a pope of mercy who preaches forgiveness and decries malevolence. I expect him to treat Trump well. And when Trump is treated well, he usually responds in kind.

Moreover, it’s crucial to realize that there actually is some common ground. One is religious persecution. Both men are concerned with Islamist attacks on Christians, especially in the Middle East and Syria. In the United States, Francis is surely pleased with Trump’s moves thus far to protect religious freedom, particularly his pro-life steps, from banning funding of International Planned Parenthood to seeking to nominate judges who will protect the rights of the likes of the Little Sisters of the Poor.

And surely, Francis should be heartened that Trump—for his first presidential trip abroad—chose to go to the Vatican. That’s a significant gesture.

As for Trump, the brash New York swagger might be tempered by the sheer majesty of the St. Peter’s environs. As one pundit told me, “trips to the Vatican” change people. They do. So do meetings with the pope.

But again, unlike Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, I don’t perceive a grand historical-spiritual vision among Donald Trump and Pope Francis. I have no lofty historic hopes for this relationship. However, if a lesson can be learned from Reagan-John Paul II, it’s this: When a president and a pope come together with some significant goal in mind, important things can happen. Good things can result. That’s something for this president and his staff to think about very prudently.

In case you missed it, Dr. Paul Kengor, the executive director of the Center for Vision & Values, was a guest on the nationally syndicated radio program “The Mark Levin Show” on Monday, May 1, 2017. Kengor and Levin discuss … More>

“Even as historians credit ­Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II with hastening the end of the Cold War, they have failed to recognize the depth or significance of the bond that developed between the two leaders.

Acclaimed scholar and bestselling author Paul Kengor changes that. In this fascinating book, he reveals a singular bond—which included a spiritual connection between the Catholic pope and the Protestant president—that drove the two men to confront what they knew to be the great evil of the twentieth century: Soviet communism.”

]]>Socialism Attacks the Family, Just as Its Inventors Intendedhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/04/socialism-attacks-the-family-just-as-its-inventors-intended/
Thu, 13 Apr 2017 13:41:58 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14235Editor’s note: This article first appeared at Stream.org.

Last year, “socialism” was the most looked-up word at Merriam-Webster.com. That is hardly a surprise. It clearly reflects growing interest, especially with the remarkable surge of lifetime socialist Bernie Sanders, who won … More>

]]>Editor’s note: This article first appeared at Stream.org.

Last year, “socialism” was the most looked-up word at Merriam-Webster.com. That is hardly a surprise. It clearly reflects growing interest, especially with the remarkable surge of lifetime socialist Bernie Sanders, who won a pile of states in pursuing the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He earned over 13 million votes nationwide. Many of those voters have only a hazy idea what socialism entails, but most surely know that it gives the government more control over the so-called “means of production” as well as your wallet and your property, but not as much as outright Communists crave.

American interest in socialism was growing well before Bernie Sanders. A telling marker came in 2011, when a major study by the Pew Research Center found that 49% of Americans aged 18-29 have a positive view of socialism, exceeding those with a positive view of capitalism. What those voters might not realize, but which I know for certain, is that socialism undermines marriage and family: I’ve published an entire book on the subject. What I learned from mining the origins of the movement is that this is not an accident: The founders of socialist movements always intended their system to have this effect.

Intended Consequences

Most obviously, socialism undermines the family economically. Socialism is ineffective, unproductive, and impoverishing. It creates not economic prosperity but backwardness, and often genuine deprivation (see Venezuela). In that way alone, socialism adversely affects what sources as diverse as Pope Francis and Ronald Reagan have described as the “fundamental cell” of society: the family.

But surely socialism’s founders didn’t realize that their system just flat-out didn’t work, right? Actually, they believed that it did—and in one sense it does: It weakens families for the benefit of the state, exactly as it creators meant it to.

Since at least the early 1800s, when the effort began in earnest, extreme-left radicals have sought to undermine the natural-traditional-Biblical family—the Western Judaeo-Christian model anchored in a man and woman as parents of a household. The steady assault on this timeless model has been a long march that culminated in the chaos of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and in the antics of the nature-redefiners of today’s secular left, which employs bullying, state coercion and demonization to forcibly redefine everything from marriage and parenting to biological sex (or as they now call it “gender”), and whether a child in the womb is even considered a life.

Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto wrote of the “abolition of the family,” which even in 1848, they could flaunt as an “infamous proposal of the communists.” What, precisely, they meant by that is a complicated subject. But complexities aside, there is no question that efforts to redefine the family structure have been long at work, from Marx and Engels to sordid figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, and assorted ‘60s New Left radicals from Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn to Mark Rudd and Tom Hayden. They included groups ranging from the Bolsheviks to the Frankfurt School of cultural Marxists to the Planned Parenthood eugenics “progressives” to the Weather Underground and many more.

Socialists on American Soil

A glance at this list of dubious characters reveals a mangled mosaic of the wide-ranging left. Among them, the earliest and maybe most revealing of the socialists specifically—at least from a family-focused perspective—was perhaps Robert Owen.

Owen (1771-1858) was an English utopian-socialist who made his way to American soil. On July 4, 1826, as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the geniuses of the Declaration of Independence, both dramatically breathed their last gasps on the 50th anniversary of their eloquent achievement on behalf of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Robert Owen stood atop his new ideological colony in New Harmony, Indiana and delivered his “Declaration of Mental Independence.” It is a document you surely didn’t read in school, but perhaps you should have, because it foretold the spirit of our modern age. Owen proclaimed:

I now declare to you and to the world that man up to this hour has been in all parts of the earth a slave to a trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon the whole race.

I refer to private property, absurd and irrational systems of religion and marriage founded upon individual property, combined with some of these irrational systems of religion.

There it was: property, religion, marriage. This was Robert Owen’s unholy trinity.

Owen’s acolytes began their new civilization by scrapping the Christian Anno Domini calendar, marking 1826 as their new Year One. He was imitating the Jacobins, who had likewise “reset” the calendar in 1794 amid their bloodcurdling de-Christianization of France. (Mussolini and Pol Pot would later follow suit.) Owen established what the 1960s hippies would call communes. Owen’s socialist communes pooled not only profits but people, replacing the nuclear family with the collective family. His socialism was cultural as well as economic, as socialism and its enthusiasts always would be.

The New Harmony colony floundered within just two years, with Owen curiously absent from his creation for sustained periods, thus setting the standard for future leftist-utopian chieftains: They rarely live according to the rules and systems they create for others. Socialism and communism have always been for “the people,” “the masses,” the ruled, but rarely for the rulers. Castro, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao—given the choice, they never lived the same way with the same rules and equal salaries as the serfs. Indeed, how could they? Their socialist-communist cocoons were always intolerable because they were bankrupt and unnatural. No one chooses that misery.

But the unnatural is what so many leftist utopians pursued then and in the years and centuries ahead. Even as Robert Owen’s New Harmony commune quickly collapsed, a dozen or so imitators sprang up around the country. Rarely did any of them last more than four years. Owen’s leftist vision remained alive and undeterred. “The social system is now firmly established,” he asserted.

An uphill stream of Owen-like dreamers on the left would keep the flame alive, from the 1820s to the 1960s in their own communes, and into the 21st century with their own versions of marriage and family. Never learning from failed projects of the past, they would always convince themselves that the previous project simply wasn’t done quite right—not yet. When they implemented their commune, their utopia, their more enlightened and modern view of marriage and the family, it would surely work this time around. Such is the socialist faith.

Polyamory and Lemonade Seas

Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was another merry socialist who reviled property, marriage, and religion. He dreamed of collectivizing the masses in communes where they could undergo fundamental transformation. (He also believed that human efforts would someday turn the seas to tasty lemonade.) A forerunner to 1960s New Left radicals on American college campuses, Fourier openly advocated the abolition of monogamous marriage, and championed polyamory, homosexuality, and other forms of what Margaret Sanger and the 1920s American progressives would celebrate as “free love.” Fourier’s lead disciple in America, Albert Brisbane, practiced what his master taught, proving himself exceptionally progressive by maintaining several mistresses and fathering three illegitimate children.

Predictably, the Fourier-Brisbane communes would work about as well as Owen’s ideological colonies, and the ones that followed. There were probably forty some such communes that sprung up around the country in this period, and quickly dissolved. No matter, leftists never give up. All they need is more power than the previous group of ideological colonists, and then they’ll get it right the next time. It is the governing spirit of their ideology. Just wait for their better, more enlightened ideas on marriage, family, sexuality, gender, and on and on. Forward!

On the heels of Fourier came John Humphrey Noyes and his Oneida colony and their newfangled designs for the family, which included group marriages that shared both intimacy and children.

Socialist Ancestors of the Gender Wars

All of these nature-redefiners plowed new ground for new versions of the family according to each of their ideological conceptions. To borrow from Pope Francis, they were engaged in “ideological colonizations.” Each new generation came up with its own socialist colonies, all the way to the Red Family Colony in Berkeley in the 1960s established by Tom Hayden and Robert Scheer. The ‘60s New Left also launched its glorious “smash monogamy” movement, which was an exciting form of marriage that would be (and had to be, they insisted) non-monogamous.

In short, these were the bold ancestors of today’s same-sex marriage movement and “LGBTQ” sex-gender redefiners. They all shared in common, then and today, the rejection of any notion that there is a single natural, traditional and Biblical model for the family.

“It is not possible to speak of ‘the’ family,” insisted Friedrich Engels. Indeed, just ask the broad range of leftists in the current-day organization “Beyond Marriage.” They agree wholeheartedly with Engels on that one.

]]>Neil Gorsuch on Life, Liberty, and the Natural Lawhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/03/neil-gorsuch-on-life-liberty-and-the-natural-law/
Fri, 24 Mar 2017 13:23:37 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14192Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at National Catholic Register.

In a stunning moment in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Neil Gorsuch, Senator Dianne Feinstein, a staunch supporter of so-called “abortion rights,” took umbrage with … More>

]]>Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at National Catholic Register.

In a stunning moment in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Neil Gorsuch, Senator Dianne Feinstein, a staunch supporter of so-called “abortion rights,” took umbrage with one of Gorsuch’s previous written statements. As Feinstein described it, “He [Gorsuch] believes there are no exceptions to the principle that ‘the intentional taking of a human life by private persons is always wrong.’”

Not to Senator Feinstein, sadly, for whom the alpha and omega is what her colleagues Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton consider a “sacred right:” a woman’s “right to choose.” Roe v. Wade is sacrosanct in their eyes, and that’s the complete opposite of what Neil Gorsuch considers sacrosanct.

The Gorsuch statement that Feinstein was quoting comes from a 2006 book that he wrote on euthanasia and assisted suicide, published by Princeton University Press. In that book, Gorsuch wrote that “all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

As for me, I will choose that worldview over the Feinstein worldview any day.

Gorsuch’s views stem from a very deep, very rich, and very old tradition known as natural law.

Natural law affirms that we do what we ought to do according to nature, to our very nature. “What we ought to do is based on what we are,” writes Peter Kreeft. The natural law, notes Kreeft, is naturally known, by natural human reason and experience. You need not be a religious believer to know the natural law, even if that law (many of us believe) was written into nature by a Creator.

Really, it’s easier to give examples of natural law than a definition. Human sexuality demonstrates natural law so well because it’s so self-evident. Another violation of natural law is murder: one human life taking another. That’s a violation held by cultures and societies and governments of all times.

Natural law is as old and varied as the Old and New Testaments, as the Jewish and Christian faiths, as Aquinas and Augustine, as John Calvin and John Paul II, as Martin Luther King Jr. and Jacques Maritain. It is considered immutable and permanent throughout the variations of history, a universal rule that binds us all. As Augustine put it, natural law is “the law that is written in the human heart.” As Aquinas explained it, the natural law allows us to “know what we must do and what we must avoid. God has given this light or law at the creation.”

Of course, Augustine and Aquinas were Christians, but one need not be a Christian to understand what Thomas Jefferson referred to as “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Pre-Christian figures like Aristotle and Cicero spoke of this eternal law. “True law is right reason in agreement with nature,” stated Cicero. “It is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting.”

Nonetheless, this hasn’t stopped many in today’s culture from aggressively seeking to redefine human nature. If you’re endeavoring to fundamentally transform human nature, especially on issues like marriage, family, sexuality, and gender, then the natural law is your chief foe. Indeed, if you’re an aggressive secular progressive, one seeking day in and day out to redefine human nature, what do you do with natural law?

One of my former students got an answer in law school, when her progressive professor boldly proclaimed that “natural law doesn’t exist.” But I caution this professor that if he/she really believes this, then he/she must also reject the natural-law-based conclusions of tribunals such as Nuremberg after World War II, when the judges told Nazi officials that regardless of what Hitler’s laws stated, they should have known that what they were doing was wrong. To gas human beings and recycle their corpses into soap and lamp shades is an obvious violation of basic laws of humanity—no excuses.

Or, consider slavery and various civil-rights laws. One current libertarian writer states that “the greatest spokesman for natural law in the twentieth century was probably Martin Luther King, who denounced segregation not because of its technical complexities, but because it betrayed the natural law principles of the Declaration of Independence.”

This being the case, most progressives will do with natural law what they do with Biblical Law and other moral laws—they will pick the applications they like and ignore or reject those they don’t. Or, even more brazenly, they will try to remake the natural law in their own image.

No, sorry, it doesn’t work that way. Nature tells you what to do; you don’t tell nature what to do. Just as your biology and your 74 trillion chromosomes tell you your gender; you don’t tell yourself your gender.

But tell that to modern disciples of the dictatorship of relativism, where everything is deemed redefinable, from one’s gender to whether a human life is even considered a human life.

Gorsuch is incredibly well-educated. It’s difficult to find a more credentialed academic pedigree. He studied natural law while earning a Ph.D. at Oxford (he has a J.D. from Harvard) under one of the world’s preeminent authorities on natural law, John Finnis. Professor Finnis was Gorsuch’s dissertation adviser. He’s now on faculty at Notre Dame Law School and a professor emeritus at Oxford. Finnis’ best-known work is his Natural Law and Natural Rights.

It was there that he issued his statement on the inviolability of all human life, and how no human being should be able to take the life of another human being—the statement that Senator Feinstein found so reprehensible.

Gorsuch is also a defender of religious liberty, which Feinstein is likewise finding objectionable.

Take Gorsuch’s statement in support of the Little Sisters of the Poor, when the Obama administration tried to force the nuns to pay for abortion drugs. He wrote: “When a law demands that a person do something the person considers sinful, and the penalty for the refusal is a large financial penalty, then the law imposes a substantial burden on that person’s free exercise of religion.”

It’s good to have Supreme Court justices of this mind, not of the thinking of the likes of Senator Feinstein.

In all, this means that Neil Gorsuch’s thinking on issues like human life and religious liberty should be in concert with faithful Christians, and it should be sympathetic to the rights of those Christians against a government that tries to coerce them.